Tomoye

Summary

Tomoye from NewsGator is a full-featured social computing platform built on .NET and optionally deployable on Microsoft SharePoint. Its rich feature set includes communities, discussions, questions and answers, wikis, blogs, micro-blogging status posts, video, video-scenario training, social bookmarking and social networking. Built for the non-technical user, community leaders can quickly configure and deploy communities. Across its 500K+ user base, Tomoye is used to support collaboration, knowledge management, social learning, and customer support. Customers include the GSA, the NSA, USAID, the US Air Force, and the US Army.

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The Tomoye activity feed keeps users up-to-date with an instant view of the most relevant status updates, documents, videos, questions, and the latest conversations around them. Users can quickly see what is happening with their colleagues or a given community or across all communities. Since these views are often content rich, users can add additional filters (category, time period, latest, most votes) to help them zoom-in on what is most important. Users can easily vote, comment, ask questions, and blog on virtually anything. Since expertise is organized by community and category, experts are very easy to locate if the search tool doesn’t return the kind of person you are looking for. A comprehensive set of RSS feeds, email participation support, and mobile access helps keeps users in the loop.

Tomoye communities are the ideal venue for collaboration and knowledge exchange across internal and external stakeholders. Communities formed around specific skill-sets (i.e., composite material engineering) or job descriptions (policy analyst) are the core of the community of practice approach. By linking people together based on professional domain, organizations can break down silos created by functional areas or projects, and generally build overall capacity in those skill areas. Features like Q&A provide a simple mechanism for users to reach out to a group of experts to help solve a problem; document sharing and collaborating around documents is a core feature of a professional community; videos of subject- matter experts answering company-relevant questions allow users to engage; and blogs provide a simple way for subject-matter experts or leaders to communicate with a broad audience--all capabilities that improve user experience around collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Users begin by sharing basic professional data about themselves like degrees, qualifications, expertise, as well as location, position, and more. These profiles create a powerful base for them to be found by others. All this rolls up to a global expertise roster across the entire enterprise where users can be found as most helpful contributors, most active, most networked, and searched freeform or by control field (e.g., based on specific expertise or their current location). Since a user’s content is a living resume, expert search can optionally include the user’s content. Activity from your network or from other’s networks is easy to track and has its own RSS feed. Expert and member rosters in communities break down the global expertise roster by the thematic areas those communities represent. Level of expertise in a given thematic area is calculated by the number of votes on the person’s content in that subject area.

Tomoye provides a venue for personal information management. The user profile is where users can share personal files, add blog entries, bookmark items, update their status, and view their peers and mentors. Your profile displays all of your personal content and any community contributions you’ve made. The profile has activity feeds for your network as well as the communities you belong to - making your profile a one-stop hub for tracking all that matters to you. Your favorites list and network has a tag cloud for ease of navigation. These activity feeds have filters to help you zero in on timely content and RSS feeds for convenience.

Because Tomoye can be deployed with Microsoft SharePoint, numerous valuable project management features are automatically present. Tomoye enhances these existing features with social capabilities like microblogging, activity streams, communities, bookmarking, tags, video and video-scenario support. Tomoye has a rich document management capability that includes configurable object types and version control. Since questions can be asked on documents directly, handling feedback from project personnel outside of the immediate review team is made easy. Through Tomoye, project managers collaborate virtually in communities where project stakeholders share and collect project information in one central location. Because of its close integration with SharePoint, project managers can leverage other existing management tools like Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Tomoye also helps with the facilitation of project management by making it easy to find subject experts and assemble teams.

Tomoye is a .NET-based system that runs on and supports the latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server. It can be deployed flexibly to support hundreds of thousands of users as an on-premise or SaaS-based solution. It supports DoD security standards, accessibility standards such as Section 508, and the Canadian Common Look and Feel standard. Tomoye supports English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, has a built-in translation workflow, and allows end users to toggle between languages dynamically. It can be deployed stand-alone (with Microsoft SharePoint connectors) or as a Microsoft SharePoint layout application to leverage your existing investment in SharePoint. It has a comprehensive API supporting integration with third-party applications. Users are able to stay connected through the use of a mobile browser.

Tomoye is fully customizable and can be built to suit your organizations' needs. Communities can be individually branded to reflect the corporate brand or otherwise. Much of the page layout can be changed without programming. There are many additional display and navigation options. Custom parts can be written and easily integrated into the page - facilitating third-party application integration. The system has a comprehensive API that supports advanced third-party integration scenarios. Web services and REST/SOAP interfaces can easily be supported. Tomoye supports an active technical community for supporting configuration and custom development. Many customer customizations are available to the entire customer-base. Non-technical community leaders can easily configure security and configure the set of object types for a given community. Users can create and modify their own social profiles and communities.

Tomoye provides a highly-secure application to meet the demanding requirements of the US military and US government. Supporting a fine-grained security model means that community leaders have full control over who can see what data and who can perform what functions at any location within the application (cross-community, community and topics). Public and private communities and combinations in-between are supported. The system supports form-based, Windows Integrated Authentication and single sign-on including Siteminder. It also has a pluggable authentication module to support custom authentication scenarios. Backups of Tomoye databases rely on third-party backup solutions for SQL Server.

NewsGator understands how social software adds value to enterprises and has a robust offering for both Microsoft SharePoint and non-Microsoft SharePoint environments. We have a strong presence in the commercial and government sectors and support some of the largest communities in the world (over 100,000 users). NewsGator Tomoye and NewsGator Social Sites boost any organization’s performance with the power of innovation management, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing both inside the enterprise and out. Selected in June 2010 as a top finalist for the Microsoft ISV Partner of the Year award, NewsGator now has more than 2.5 million paid enterprise social computing users and the largest Government 2.0 implementations. Customers achieving results include Accenture, Biogen Idec, CME Federal Credit Union, Deloitte, Fujitsu, Novartis, The United States Air Force and The United States Army.

Tomoye comes highly supported. Users are able to submit questions via a central portal with a form based ticket to NewsGator. This collection method streamlines resolve times as it helps to gather all of the customer’s information about their question up front. This means that all Tomoye users can expect to hear back about their questions within one business day. All users are also granted access to public communities where customer collaboration is encouraged via best practices, tips and tricks, and driving adoption. All users are emailed information regarding any site changes including new documentation, downloads, and/or changes. Customers are also able to subscribe to content updates via their own preferred RSS reader, giving them access to information.